11 the locality of the wrongful occurrences, so as to function regularly and permanently (as from 1994) and to put into operation a dispensary which existed in that place (resolutory point n. 5). 31. Seven and a half years later, the Court, in the present case of the "Street Children", in abiding by a request of the representatives of the relatives of the victims, again orders a non-pecuniary reparation, of the kind of obligations of doing, consisting in "designating an education centre with a name referring to the youngsters victims of this case and placing in such centre a plaque with the names" of the five murdered adolescents (resolutory point n. 7, and cf. par. 103). As very well pointed out by the Court, this measure "would contribute to awake the conscience in order to avoid the repetition of wrongful acts such as those occurred in the present case and to keep alive the memory of the victims"38. 32. In the cas d'espèce, the Court has, thus, duly valued the living conditions of abandonment of the so-called "street children", brutally victimized, bearing "in mind the general adverse conditions of abandonment suffered by the five youngsters in the streets, who remained in a situation of high risk and without any help as to their future" (par. 90). In the whole present Judgment on reparations in the case of the "Street Children", the Court sought to fulfill the basic - material and other - needs of their relatives. And, both in the fixing of the moral damage (pars. 88-93), as in relation to the aforementioned measures of satisfaction (pars. 98-103), - to me of the greatest importance, - the Court also kept in mind the melancholic reality of the five adolescents victimized in the street. 33. In the present case of the "Street Children", the five direct victims, before being cruelly and arbitrarily deprived of their lives, were already deprived of creating and developing a project of life (and of seeking a meaning for their existence). They used to stay in the streets in a situation of high risk, vulnerability and defencelessness, amidst the humiliation of misery and a state of suffering amounting to a spiritual death, - like millions of other youngsters (in growing numbers) in all Latin America and all over the "globalized" - more precisely, dehumanized - world of this beginning of the XXIst century. May the present Judgment on reparations serve, thus, also of encouragement to all those who, in our countries of Latin America, have experienced the pain of losing a beloved person in similar circumstances of suffering and humiliation, aggravated by the impunity and the indifference of the social milieu. 34. In the case of Loayza Tamayo versus Peru (reparations, 1998), it was pointed out, in the same line of reasoning, that - "(...) Contrary to what the materialist conception of the homo oeconomicus pretends, a conception regrettably prevailing in our times, (...) the human being is not 38 . Par. 103 (emphasis added).

Select target paragraph3

Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents